The Cemetery Diaries
Living Victorious
They say that sometimes when you drink, the worst side of you comes out. Maybe I’ve been drinking too much, from vials of fairy liquor in clubs and goblets of Eucharistic wine and blood in churchyards? How else could I possibly have contributed to something so hideous, so overpowering? Or is that I truly had no part in the bloodbath, and have been labelled a scapegoat? Somehow, I doubt that, the way that death has been following me. I’m cursed. Even now, a shadow follows me behind my eyelids, where the past and the future mingle in my head.
I feel delirious, but it can’t be the heat. I’ve only been here for a day, and I’ve had my preservative dose. The crypt and my mostly nocturnal schedule, except when I went to clubs, kept me cool most of the rest of the summer. My muscles shouldn’t be dissolving yet, spewing toxic proteins into the slime that is all that’s left of my blood. I turn over in my bed, my stomach flipping inside me. The morning light, which came up through the windows, has revealed the true state of the cottage. This room is gone to dust as though the rumours about vampires and sunlight are true, and my real body is a heap of ash scattered across the floor and smeared across the walls and mouldy curtains. I’ll probably have to demolish the inside of the house and completely rebuild it. I’m starting to wonder whether it would have been easier just to move into an apartment, but of course, part of the advantage of living off the maps is being more difficult to chart. I have to be in total isolation, or else whatever is hounding me will finally catch up.
I pace into the main room again, seeing it in a new light where the morning pools in puddles on the musty rugs, once the rich colour of a wine stain, now dull and grey. I am forever drawn to the mantelpiece, the only part of the house that has endured, where the books are arrayed. Here is world my family knew, encased in out-dated texts, home remedy companions, titles on medicine, science and God. If only I too could be a relic of the past, rather than a timeless thing, with no roots and no era to belong to. I might try to make a home of this dwelling, but it will never truly be home. I thumb through pages, feeling the texture of the paper, the coarse, rough consistency of some books and the filminess of others whose pages are as thin as dragonfly wings. Eventually, a small, crusty notebook, wrapped in leather like a parcel, catches my attention. I gently unwind the ribbon around the front, and crack it down its spine.
It’s a diary, not totally unlike my own. There is a name inside the cover –Cornelius Southwell– and a date– 1858. I realise as I turn the pages that I was already dead in that year, forever twenty-seven and yet part of a race who do not age at all. As I read, slouching against a fireplace filled with charred ruins of coals, I am immediately struck by the notion that, in history, it is the victors who choose how to tell each story. The losers lose because they’re dead, and so history belongs to the living, to men like my uncle who write in peace by the reassuring crackling of a fire in a grate. This diary speaks of mundane things, breaking horses, shearing sheep, chopping down timber for firewood and stocking the various cool rooms and sheds about the property. It stands in stark contrast to my own journal, which is about killing, fear and supernatural things without proper explanations. I suppose that, in my own case, my diary writing is partly an attempt to reverse the monopoly of the living on history. Dead men, I prove, can have stories, too.
Then, I stumble across an entry that is different from its brethren. This one is not about the shimmering heat in rural New South Wales. It does not mention rain-drenched eucalypts, fiery sunsets or dry lightning, errant foxes or rabbits caught in traps. There is nothing in it about the tang of a new storm, grey clouds gathering or precious rain falling in fat, heavy droplets like rainbow-riddled opals. It starts with a single line:
Everything we touch comes to life.
And then a paragraph:
We writers are creators, the men of my line more so than you would think. We experience everything more intensely than ordinary people. It’s a dangerous power, and one that sees one’s monstrous side come out from time to time.
A dangerous power? I hold the book in front of my face, leaning back so that the words cannot confront me, so that I only see them on an angle, as if this way I can prevent them leeching into my skull and measuring things inside my brain. The line that comes next, however, is impossible to ignore. I have to confront its full force, letting it burn marks inside my memory, marking me with its brand.
It’s a hereditary burden. And that’s why the Southwell line must suffer no more sons.
I feel delirious, but it can’t be the heat. I’ve only been here for a day, and I’ve had my preservative dose. The crypt and my mostly nocturnal schedule, except when I went to clubs, kept me cool most of the rest of the summer. My muscles shouldn’t be dissolving yet, spewing toxic proteins into the slime that is all that’s left of my blood. I turn over in my bed, my stomach flipping inside me. The morning light, which came up through the windows, has revealed the true state of the cottage. This room is gone to dust as though the rumours about vampires and sunlight are true, and my real body is a heap of ash scattered across the floor and smeared across the walls and mouldy curtains. I’ll probably have to demolish the inside of the house and completely rebuild it. I’m starting to wonder whether it would have been easier just to move into an apartment, but of course, part of the advantage of living off the maps is being more difficult to chart. I have to be in total isolation, or else whatever is hounding me will finally catch up.
I pace into the main room again, seeing it in a new light where the morning pools in puddles on the musty rugs, once the rich colour of a wine stain, now dull and grey. I am forever drawn to the mantelpiece, the only part of the house that has endured, where the books are arrayed. Here is world my family knew, encased in out-dated texts, home remedy companions, titles on medicine, science and God. If only I too could be a relic of the past, rather than a timeless thing, with no roots and no era to belong to. I might try to make a home of this dwelling, but it will never truly be home. I thumb through pages, feeling the texture of the paper, the coarse, rough consistency of some books and the filminess of others whose pages are as thin as dragonfly wings. Eventually, a small, crusty notebook, wrapped in leather like a parcel, catches my attention. I gently unwind the ribbon around the front, and crack it down its spine.
It’s a diary, not totally unlike my own. There is a name inside the cover –Cornelius Southwell– and a date– 1858. I realise as I turn the pages that I was already dead in that year, forever twenty-seven and yet part of a race who do not age at all. As I read, slouching against a fireplace filled with charred ruins of coals, I am immediately struck by the notion that, in history, it is the victors who choose how to tell each story. The losers lose because they’re dead, and so history belongs to the living, to men like my uncle who write in peace by the reassuring crackling of a fire in a grate. This diary speaks of mundane things, breaking horses, shearing sheep, chopping down timber for firewood and stocking the various cool rooms and sheds about the property. It stands in stark contrast to my own journal, which is about killing, fear and supernatural things without proper explanations. I suppose that, in my own case, my diary writing is partly an attempt to reverse the monopoly of the living on history. Dead men, I prove, can have stories, too.
Then, I stumble across an entry that is different from its brethren. This one is not about the shimmering heat in rural New South Wales. It does not mention rain-drenched eucalypts, fiery sunsets or dry lightning, errant foxes or rabbits caught in traps. There is nothing in it about the tang of a new storm, grey clouds gathering or precious rain falling in fat, heavy droplets like rainbow-riddled opals. It starts with a single line:
Everything we touch comes to life.
And then a paragraph:
We writers are creators, the men of my line more so than you would think. We experience everything more intensely than ordinary people. It’s a dangerous power, and one that sees one’s monstrous side come out from time to time.
A dangerous power? I hold the book in front of my face, leaning back so that the words cannot confront me, so that I only see them on an angle, as if this way I can prevent them leeching into my skull and measuring things inside my brain. The line that comes next, however, is impossible to ignore. I have to confront its full force, letting it burn marks inside my memory, marking me with its brand.
It’s a hereditary burden. And that’s why the Southwell line must suffer no more sons.